Find Your Flow

What is flow?

Often times when we are using our strengths we can find ourselves in the state known as flow. This is a state in which we lose sense of the world around us, time seems to evaporate and we look back on the experience as enjoyable. Flow can be found in many activities and
pastimes that we like doing. It could be reading a book, playing video games or learning a new skill. The idea isn’t necessarily to induce flow, rather to recognise when we are in the flow state and keep doing those things.

The diagram below shows how we may respond to completing a task based on the level of skill we have to complete the task and how challenging the task is for us. When there is a balance of skill and challenge we enter flow.

Flow research has its origins in a desire to understand the nature of activity which is intrinsically motivating and rewarding in and of itself (autolectic). The conditions for
this to occur include; having opportunities that stretch existing skills (challenges) and having clear goals and immediate feedback about the progress being made. As such, the state of flow is thought to be one of ‘dynamic equilibrium’ , by its nature the activity draws us in and encourages us to maintain the equilibrium by continuing to harder and harder challenges as we develop our skill set

(Nakarmura & Csikszentmihalyi, 2002).

Recognising Flow:

The focus when it comes to flow is on the subjective experience of the individual in the flow state. This means that flow can be found in almost any task or activity. A factor that may change our experience of flow is whether the challenge is an active or passive activity. Higher levels of flow tend to be reported when the person is pursuing active challenges, e.g. sport, rather than passive ones e.g. watching TV.

There are several other features that delineate between regular experiences and those in which we have entered flow. These include the following:

• You experience a balance between your level of skill and the challenge that you are taking on.
• You experience a sense of reward.
• There is a clear goal.
• You experience a state of intense and focused concentration in what you are doing.
• You lose self-consciousness, you are not aware of or concerned with others around you.
• You are getting immediate feedback from what you are doing and how it is going.
• You lose sense of time passing.
• You feel a sense of control.
• You experience effortless involvement.

Obstacles to Flow

The capacity to experience flow is considered to be universal but the way in which each person experiences it, the frequency, quality and duration of it are individual. It’s
normal sometimes to struggle with finding your flow even with activities that would normally put you into flow. Obstacles may arise as a result of environmental factors which make it difficult to fully immerse attention in something. There are also other more individual considerations, such as; feeling self-conscious, having trouble concentrating on the task and over attending to information in the environment which makes it hard to focus attention on just one thing.

Emotion

One of the distinguishing features of a flow experience is that the person may be so absorbed that they do not have a sense of their own emotion during the activity. Individuals may report enjoyment, although this tends to be a reflection of the experience following the activity.

Discover More

The worksheet below is to help you to identify what activities put you into flow.

Find your flow (403.55kB)

Consider More:

u003cp class=u0022p1u0022u003e1) Can you think of two activities that you do that put you in a state of flow?u003c/pu003ernu003cp class=u0022p1u0022u003e2) Can you think of a time when you stopped an activity because it made you anxious or bored?u003c/pu003e